This continues our special essay by our new editor, Assaf H. Part 1 was posted on Thur, March 3rd, please click here to read Part 1.

Two units of security forces remained in the area. Partly police partly military unit, the notorious Border Police is feared and admired for its efficient use of brute force. It also serves as a model of ethnic diversity, containing high numbers of Ethiopian Jews, Bedouins, Druze and migrants from the former Soviet Union. The 50th Battalion of the Nahal (the Hebrew acronym for Pioneering Fighting Youth) is less varied in its ethnic composition and most of its soldiers arrive from secular settlements and Kibbutzim traditionally known for their Leftist orientations. The Nahal was established in the early years of the Israeli state for the purpose of realizing a socialist-Zionist settlement ideology. Nahal groups would camp in territories lacking Jewish populace, their military camps eventually naturalized and transformed into civilian communities. Over the years this national task was mostly taken over by religious-Zionist settlers.

In comparison to the light gear of the Border Police, the equipment of the Nahal soldiers appeared very cumbersome. Red army boots, camouflaged ceramic helmets, a fat ammunition vest, a short M-16 rifle and a large backpack completely full with who knows what. I examined the differences when all of a sudden I heard loud hurried voices coming from the communication devices of the Border Police. Nahal soldiers began running down the slopes toward the road. Inspecting my surrounding I could not miss the two thick columns of smoke that began to rise up to the north, the closest one no more than 300 meters ahead. Price Tag policy. I began running up the road.

“Price Tag” is an economically inspired euphemism given to violent actions of intimidation and revenge carried out against Palestinians and their possessions. These violent acts are executed by a group of probably no more than two hundred mostly teenage settlers who are backed by several hard-line Rabbis. The political rational is quite simple: Palestinians serve as scapegoats for any governmental or non-governmental action taken against settlers. These highly committed Jewish troublemakers hope to strategically compensate for their small numbers through battles of attrition with Israeli security forces. An additional deeply ingrained logic is at work: Arabs only understand the language of force and they need to realize that this is not their land, but a divinely sanctioned Jewish land.

Hardly keeping up with the Nahal soldiers, I passed a traffic blockade made out of concrete cubes and continued running up the dusty road into the Palestinian area. A brushfire in the terraced olive grove to the left produced a lot of smoke. Several smoking charred circles to the right marked a failed arson attempt. A young settler was being dragged by Border Policemen out of the olive grove ahead. Beyond the grove, Nahal soldiers slowly climbed yet another hill toward a small settler “outpost” of tin houses. Next to the olive grove and outside the patio of a flat-roofed two-story building, a mixed group of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian women was forming. Three settlers walked down the road in my direction, smiling as they passed the soldiers. Price Tag attacks sometimes occur when many of the physically able Arab males are at work. Women, children and old are usually left to fend for themselves. When around, the heavily equipped soldiers cannot catch the light footed thugs. But all I could see was the waving of arms in the distance. I wanted to get closer.

Inside the olive grove the soldiers finally rejoined a larger group. Their commander, a red headed Major began debriefing them. I was about to pass them when the Major commanded me to stop: “Where do you think you are going?” “Over there” I pointed my finger. “What business do you have there?” “I am an anthropology student, doing research on settlers. I am not going to cause any trouble,” I assured him, thinking I should have left my yarmulke in the car. “You are not supposed to be here, do you have a journalist or a photojournalist card?” “I can show you my student card if you don't believe me,” I responded with a smile. He did not smile. Red-faced, sweaty and still heavily breathing due to a recent physical effort, he looked at me with anger. “Get out of here now” he ordered with a raised voice. “I promise you I am only here to look,” I said trying to appear as emphatic as possible. I gently laid my hand on his shoulder. “Don't touch me, get your hand off me” he barked and recoiled in disgust. Last try. “I am sorry, but I am really a student, a doctoral student.” “Well, I am a doctor too” he threw back at me, “now get the hell out of my sight.” You!” he yelled at one of the smallest soldiers in the group, “take him and escort him all the way down. Make sure he does not come back.”

The soldier grabbed me by the shirt and shoved me out of the olive grove. Shortly after he apologized, “don't take it personally, but yarmulke wearers are not too popular here at this moment, if you know what I mean.”

The brushfire burned low. An overweight reserve officer stood on one of the terraces and gazed at it. Behind him, a young female soldier looked unhappy. “This is not a big one, we should be able to handle it with a fire extinguisher” the officer told her. “What?” ”We should use a fire extinguisher in case it spreads further” he repeated. “We don't have one” she replied while moving down and away from the fire. “Isn't there one in the Jeep? Bring one from the Jeep.” He seemed to be talking to himself. “There is none in the Jeep” she replied with a whining voice. The reserve officer did not give up. “We should get a fire extinguisher!” he shouted to an older officer waiting below. The Grey haired Lieutenant-Colonel was also ready to leave but he looked too exhausted to even respond. “He asks if you have a fire extinguisher in the jeep” I told him. He made a tired gesture with his hand and muttered “come on, let's get out of here. Their own services can take care of that.”
The yarmulke stayed on my head until I passed the last checkpoint out of the occupied territories.

This finishes our special two part essay by new editor Assaf H. Click here to read Part 1.

Highway 60 coils through the southern hills of Hebron and Judea, dissolves into Jerusalem, reemerges from it toward Samaria, and as it nears the biblical Mounts of Blessing and Curse, it escapes the West Bank. Roughly reflecting the ancient Route of the Patriarchs – a path which followed the imaginary line of this hilly region's watershed – it is the longest and most traveled road in the West Bank. Joining countless nomads, pilgrims, merchants, refugees and armies that have marched upon it throughout history, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are said to have traveled it too. Over the years, the highway's route and appearance were altered in architectural attempts at reducing violent frictions between Jewish and Arab populations while also maintaining or even upgrading the quality of Israeli life. It now bypasses those Palestinian population centers identified as hostile, and hosts many checkpoints that regulate Palestinian movement. Monumental walls were erected, electronic fences planted, military watchtowers were raised, bridges constructed and long tunnels were carved into mountain sides in order to protect Israeli passengers from stones, molotov cocktails, explosive cars, side bombs, and sniper attacks.

Defying human actions, the scenery managed to sustain much of its rustic character. And, regardless of all the security bypasses, Highway 60 still passes through several Palestinian villages, sometimes cutting them into half, sometimes reconstituting itself as their main road, merging into a militarized discord of an increasingly urbanized rural life. With the latest Israeli easements of Palestinian movement restrictions, those residing under Palestinian jurisdiction get to use Highway 60 too. The Highway consist mostly of two lanes, contains maybe two or three traffic lights on its West Bank path, and sharply illustrates why the area is often referred to as “the wild west.” The road is a vigilante zone where lawlessness manifests itself in countless forms as national and personal anxieties find their motorized alleviation in a host of logically defying accelerations, stunts, and just plain stupid driving. I constantly witness trucks, school buses, military vehicles or simple family cars speed on the wrong side of the road without any care for basic traffic laws. Sometimes when I drive my body tenses in a disciplined manner when I notice Palestinian vehicles heading toward me. All that officially protects me is the thin white line in the middle of the road. Paint, that's all there really is to it. But even though so many people ignore this thin white line, when the moment of truth arrives, everyone seems to possess an existential knowledge about the correct side and the proper actions they must take.

On the eve of the latest round of peace talks, four Jews rode Highway 60 down south toward their settlement. Shortly after passing the road leading to Hebron – the City of the Patriarchs – they were ambushed and shot to death by Palestinians. Two of the victims, the parents of six, were pregnant with a seventh child. Another female victim gave birth to a single child following many years of fertility treatments. Her husband volunteers at a religious medical organization that identifies and treats the dead following “tragic incidents.” He found his dead wife inside the bullet ridden white station wagon while on duty. The 25 year old male victim left a young widow, pregnant with their first and last to be born child. All murdered for a cause, their death feeding a growing violence and suffering of people in this land.

Around noon-time the following day, the 25 Kilometer stretch of Highway 60 connecting my settlement to the victims' home was temporarily modified. Dozens of checkpoints appeared, deserted military posts were manned and hundreds of Israeli soldiers took positions on roadsides, adjacent hills, fields, and buildings. Military traffic was drastically increased and Palestinian vehicles disappeared completely from the main road, only to be seen slowly accumulating beyond military blockades separating their local roads from the Highway. More than a thousand mourners attended a quadruple funeral service of national significance, forming a long convoy armed with enough privately owned weapons to protect itself without a need of additional assistance. Having failed to protect Israeli citizens the former evening, Israeli security forces still had to maintain order and display sovereignty through a spectacular performance of presence.

Tragedies of this kind are always expropriated from the private domain when given social meanings. ”In the building of Jerusalem and Israel we shall be consulted, and all enemies shall know they cannot defeat us,” is one example from the funeral service. But such rhetoric was mostly drowned by an excess of sorrow. A husband begging his dead wife not to leave him alone. The communal rabbi confronting God for bringing six orphans into this world. A contagious sobbing of hundreds of people. At some point I began to explore the outskirts of the funeral. Emanating from large loud speakers, the eulogies continued to follow me. At the back of the empty communal center I saw a lone middle-aged man. Black bearded, light-colored crochet Yarmulke and a short-sleeved flannel shirt. The classic look. Seated on a small school chair, an M-16 rifle laying on the ground, he silently wept.

The four dead were to be buried at three different cemeteries, and when the large service broke into smaller funeral processions, people were forced to choose one burial site over the other. I decided to follow the large procession heading north toward Jerusalem, which was also the direction of the nearest gas station. With hundreds of cars parked at the roadsides, a traffic jam was to be expected. Not waiting for the mess to coalesce, I quickly escaped the area and drove toward Hebron's gas station where I filled my station wagon with $60 worth of gas before heading back. It was busy around the spot where the four were murdered. Policemen and soldiers tried to regulate traffic. Some funeral attendees improvised a monument out of stones, flowers, and small Israeli flags. Security forces guarded entrances to neighboring Palestinian areas, preventing Jewish troublemakers from instigating conflicts with the local Arab population. I continued driving back to see what was going on at the procession's point of origin and found the place empty except for hitchhikers trying to catch a ride south. Returning north to the place of the attack I saw that the funeral procession already left during my 15 minutes absence. Several groups of soldiers still patrolled the nearby hills. Aside from that, a relative calmness. I parked the car.

End of Part 1 of a two-part special Fieldnote from Anthropology Now's newest editor, Assaf H. Keep an eye out for Part 2 to come Monday, March 14!

Research takes perseverance and grit, but there is no denying that it comes with certain pleasures, too. In Palestinian society, research feeds both mind and body. Once, I was interviewing two young men who were in a hurry to go on an afternoon excursion. Still, they presented me with soda and then coffee on a shiny round tray. During another interview, I enjoyed watermelon and ice cream cake. As I ate, I pondered: What could be easier than research in which people conceive of the researcher as a guest?

Obviously, though, the work of research is more than just managing the watermelon juice that threatens to escape from the sides of one’s mouth as one poses the next question. Another juicy challenge of this project has been tracking key terms as they circulate between U.S. news articles and Palestinian interpretations. The word “chaos” popped up often in U.S. news coverage of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Yasser Arafat’s 2004 funeral. That November day, PA officials’ plans to bury Arafat in a private ceremony went awry when some of the tens of thousands of Palestinian mourners who had gathered for the funeral scaled walls to fill the courtyard where Arafat was to be buried. PA officials struggled to move Arafat’s body from the helicoptor that bore it to the gravesite, fearing the crowds might whisk it off for a more traditional – but less controlled – public procession.

Some of the U.S. foreign correspondents’ writings about the funeral reflected longstanding U.S. critiques of Arafat. A Newsweek correspondent wrote,

[Arafat’s] successors wanted an orderly funeral. They brought in bulldozers to clean up Yasser Arafat’s broken-down headquarters in Ramallah. They sealed off the compound to keep out the crowds. They even cleared a hall in which Arafat would lay in state while dignitaries passed by the coffin. What they got instead was the untidy drama of the old regime, the kind of chaos that Arafat thrived on.

In a similar vein, USA Today reported, “In an alley off the square, a man whose face was covered with a black-and-white keffiyah – the headscarf worn by Arafat and that has come to symbolize the Palestinain cause – fired a pistol in the air before melting into the crowd.” Such descriptive passages are laden with meaning. I was curious about how my interviewees would interpret them.

I knew the term “chaos” – translated to fawda in Arabic – would attract my interviewees’ attention. I had found that fawda could describe everything from a buzzy throng at a children’s summer camp to the political crisis of leadership in the West Bank in 2006 and after. During that time, the PA had lacked the power to prohibit militia members from carrying bigger guns than the official security forces, or to keep a marriage dispute from turning to fisticuffs and gunfire. Over the last two years or so, many have conversely complained that the PA has gone too far in repressing its political opponents.

The Palestinians I spoke to expressed diverse readings of the passages. One college student in Nablus thought the articles aptly identified a stubborn problem in Palestinian political culture. As he said, “One of our historical mistakes from the beginning of the modern revolution in 1964 was that the kind of enculturation we had was not democratic and civilized. It was revolutionary: ‘Let’s fight, and we’re going to liberate our lands and return to them’… there wasn’t a theoretical framing that there should have been, and there wasn’t a democratic enculturation, either. So what I liked about [the Newsweek] article was the tie between the disorder that Arafat caused, and its effects after he died. It even affected his own funeral.” His friend, a Nablus student in the department of political science, parsed the word fawda as “anarchy,” and though he referenced Bakunin with enthusiasm, he maintained that a bit more order at the funeral would have been a good thing.

On another day, I spoke to a Palestinian from a Bethlehem refugee camp, who was also in his early twenties but was not in college. He was much more critical of the articles. He had been at the funeral, and he knew the crowds had been unruly. He insisted, however, that it had been,an “organized chaos,” which can be a “beautiful thing, because authorities cannot control people absolutely, to give people a line and insist that they walk it perfectly.” He continued that an “organized chaos can be something sweet because it can be the expression of a popular opinion.” Although he had not studied anarchism, or much other political theory, the theories he expressed about “chaos” resonated deeply in a context in which state authority has been so repressive.

He also read into the passage about the gunman “melting into the crowd” a suggestion that violence was a pervasive part of Palestinian life, something which he adamantly rejected. He pointed out that Israelis also use gunfire as a means of saluting fallen soldiers and leaders.

I was curious at their different evaluations of the articles. Perhaps their answers had sprung from different political orientations or philosophies. I also wondered if the Nablus students’ evaluations of “chaos” were in part rooted in their own experiences in their city, where lawlessness had affected daily life more than in any other part of the West Bank. Perhaps the Bethlehem man who had attended the funeral was analyzing the day and the articles on the basis of his own experiences, too. He had been proud to take part in that historic day.

Ultimately, fieldwork can feel piecemeal and inconclusive, but, as I packed my bags, I looked forward to bringing my own analytic writing into dialogue with these young men’s perspectives – even though I knew I’d have to make my own coffee and slice my own watermelon to fuel my writing.

This research was funded by the Tufts University Faculty Research Fund.

Amahl Bishara is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at Tufts University. This is the 3rd and last post in a series of ‘Fieldnotes’ she has written for www.anthronow.com. You can find her previous posts under the ‘Fieldnotes’ category.

photo courtesy of A. Bishara

This summer I’m doing interviews with Palestinian journalists and refugees in which I ask them to interpret and critique U.S. news articles. Why, you might ask, did I choose journalists and refugees as my commentators? Why didn’t I try to obtain a broader cross-section of Palestinian society?

In looking for Palestinian commentary on U.S. news articles, I knew that I couldn’t find one Palestinian voice that would represent all Palestinians. Not all Palestinians would respond to an article in the same way. Instead, I wanted to select types of people whose voices tend to be excluded not only by U.S. media, but also by their own political processes, like those of the less-than-democratic Palestinian Authority.

Refugees certainly fit this bill. Palestinian refugees were forced to leave their home villages and cities in 1948. Since then, Israel has refused to allow them to return to those homes. A United Nations agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), set up temporary houses for them in dozens of camps in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Though refugees share a common claim to their right to return to their home villages, on a practical level, they have fared differently in each location.

In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, refugees are constrained in the same ways as non-refugees by the Israeli military occupation. However, refugee camps are distinct communities, physically set apart from other neighborhoods. For example, you know you are entering a refugee camp because the streets are narrower. Refugees are also slightly poorer than the rest of the Palestinian population. Moreover, for decades refugee camps have led challenges to Israeli occupation. This has made refugees a significant political group in Palestinian society.

Yet sympathetic U.S. human interest stories about Palestinians often report on middle class or wealthy Palestinians who work in computer technology, run fancy restaurants, or open cinemas. If we do not attend to the voices of other Palestinians, we will exclude an important part of Palestinian society from political dialogues in the news.

My reasons for asking journalists to comment on articles are a bit different. This is a part of a larger project in which I study how Palestinian journalists contribute to the production of U.S. news. Palestinians work as reporters, producers, fixers, and photojournalists for U.S. news organizations. Photojournalists and reporters gather information to be shaped by writers and editors. Fixers and producers guide foreign correspondents to information. Rarely, however, do these Palestinian journalists select a feature story and write it exactly as they would like.

So with this project, I wanted to give them the opportunity to comment on stories that they might have worked on, but may not have seen in their final forms. I also wanted to talk to journalists because I presumed their expertise on the craft of reporting would allow them to make specific critiques, but also be sympathetic to the challenges of this work.

In my interviews, I’ve found a lot of diversity within the refugee and journalist groups themselves. One refugee had the sharp critical eye I expected from journalists due to his frequent attendance at protests. [Just from the descriptions and quotes in an article on a demonstration, he surmised that the journalist made the report while standing with the Israeli commmander repressing the protest, rather than with the protesters]. One journalist was harshly critical of an article by a Palestinian journalist while another embraced it – but neither referred to technical aspects of the reporting, like where the journalist might have been positioned or whether the journalist should have spoken to different sources.

Even when people were critical of an article, they presented different reasonings. For example, an article described a new and expensive restaurant as evidence that the Ramallah economy was picking up. One journalist’s opinion was that such restaurants were not where most Palestinians liked to have fun. Rather, she and her friends liked to go to coffeehouses. Also, they socialized during the day, not at night. One refugee commented that this restaurant in particular was only for the wealthy. If he wanted to write an article about whether or not the Palestinian economy was picking up, he’d talk to vegetable sellers, rather than restauranteurs, since, after all, everybody buys vegetables. This rich variety of responses, I thought, was one reason to continue these kinds of conversations.

Findings is a new, regular column contribution appearing in the magazine, Anthropology Now. Each column highlight emerging anthropological research through a series of short reviews co-authored and co-edited by a diverse student collective from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The website is happy to be able to offer a sample of this column appearing in the new Fall issue #2 of Anthropology Now. If you like what you see, please visit Paradigm Publishers for more information on how to subscribe and get full access to the magazine, Anthropology Now.

Silencing Race
Angelina E. Castagno. 2008. “‘I Don’t Want to Hear That!’: Legitimating Whiteness through Silence in Schools.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39(3): 314–333.

Despite the adage “Silence is golden,” stifling and ignoring student discussion about race in schools helps reinforce whiteness as the status quo. Angelina E. Castagno’s one-year ethnographic study of two junior high schools in Utah found that the primary lessons taught about race and racism are often communicated through silence. This remains common even in school districts that embrace “multiculturalism” as school policy, educate racially diverse student populations, and employ racial categories to measure and track gaps in academic achievement. White educators frequently prioritize their own comfort over allowing frank discussions about race in their classroom both by remaining silent about race and racism and by silencing students’ “race talk.” Teachers use racially coded language—such as language ability and reference to social class—to avoid talking about the social significance of race in structuring the school environment and student experience. Further, teachers ignore “race talk” by failing to address students’ informal charges of systematic racial discrimination and by failing to interrupt racist comments by students in class. Such “color-mute” strategies convey to students that systemic racism is either nonexistent or unimportant. Teachers also actively silence student commentary about race as “impolite,” thereby reinforcing the message that race should not be publicly discussed. Engaging in silence and silencing helps to enforce the illusion that race does not matter and reinforces the dominance of whiteness in schools.

Given the ongoing prevalence of de facto racial segregation in public schools in the United States, such a consistent pattern among educators defending the racial status quo through silence is troubling. Castagno’s research illustrates that teachers’ desires to alleviate conflict and fear of broaching discussions about race provide the emotional base for silencing race-talk. However, this commitment to politeness reinforces the status quo and inhibits educators from challenging students’ racial biases. Recognizing that all U.S. youth encounter a social world steeped in racial images and organized by racial hierarchies, adhering to the rule that “silence is golden” does our youth an injustice.

—Sophie Statzel

Waging Tourism
Rebecca Stein. 2008. “Souvenirs of Conquest: Israeli Occupations as Tourist Events.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40:647–669.

Last March, global media outlets celebrated the resumption of package tours to war-ravaged Iraq as a sign of more settled times and a potential revenue stream in a devastated economy. A more critical look at tourism raises uncomfortable questions about the global distribution of wealth and power. Who has the financial means and political standing to cross borders as consumer and voyeur? What kind of travel is celebrated in tourist accounts, obscuring more painful journeys of economic migrants, refugees, and prisoners? When colonial occupation or military violence facilitates vacationing, another question arises: when does tourism become complicit with violence?

Rebecca Stein addresses this last question with reference to Israel in her article, “Souvenirs of Conquest.” She explores connections between militarism and leisure through a critical reading of media accounts of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and ensuing occupation, as well as the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Israeli tourist activities boomed in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other occupied Palestinian cities in the days following the 1967 war. Reports of sightseeing excursions, pilgrimages, and bargain-hunting expeditions lauded Israeli tourism while masking the recent violence. Occupied Palestinian territories were redescribed as tourism locales at the same time that they were reconfigured as exploitable sources of cheap labor and natural resources, markets for Israeli commodities, and targets of territorial expansion through the construction of settlements.

In accounts of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli soldier becomes the new tourist-consumer. The violence and suffering of war are hidden amid tales of outings to restaurants and markets, of soldiers dancing the night away in clubs and enjoying the hospitality of their Lebanese hosts at a picnic.
Tourist accounts depict occupation in “positively pleasurable terms, rewriting [incursion and occupation] as experiences of collective sightseeing” (661). Stein argues that tourism is a tactic of “anti-conquest”—a means of cloaking ongoing state violence and occupation in a consumer-friendly shroud. Tourism explicitly avoids recognizing the violence that underwrites it. Reminders of this entanglement of tourism and militarism abound, whether in new package tours to Iraq or in picnicking sightseers in the hills above Gaza, replete with binoculars and portable espresso machines, consuming scenes of destruction in the first days of 2009.

—John Warner

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photo courtesy of Amahl Bishara

This summer, after two years away, I’m back in my old field site, far from the Massachusetts university where I’ve just completed my first year of teaching.  On the ride from Tel Aviv airport to Jerusalem, I take an informal census of the roadside wildflowers as I try to avoid the inevitable politics of the shared taxicab.  Attempting to delay my entrée into politics proves futile, though.  Soon the driver tells me that he cannot deposit me at the Arab hotel I have chosen for its (relative) centrality & neutrality, due to a few inexplicably blocked roads severing the main route from predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem to predominantly Arab East Jerusalem.

A few taxicabs later, I arrive at the apartment my husband has found for us, and we receive visitors in twos and threes.  I relish seeing how the children have grown and wistfully await longer conversations with these dear friends.  A few days later, I re-connect with an associate who has not only an arrangement with an office store for cheap copying, but also a car to take me to the store.  How much more convenient fieldwork is the second time around!  After a few minutes of clicking-churning copy machine sounds that dare me to dance like Bjork in Dancer in the Dark, my fieldwork is on its way.

The copies are integral to my fieldwork.  This summer, I’m asking Palestinians to read and critique translated U.S. news articles from the second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that began in 2000.  For example, I might ask a Palestinian to consider whether an article about the separation wall that Israel built in the West Bank represents the topic thoroughly and accurately from the perspective of someone who lives next to that wall.  I’ll also ask what Palestinians think these articles might tell U.S. audiences, correctly or incorrectly, about Palestinian society as a whole.

This project stems from a tradition of using anthropological films and writings to create dialogues with those in the field.  Usually, anthropologists write or make films about a select group of people in a field site and they have the last word on how and what is written or filmed. By conducting interviews with people in the field about these anthropological writings or films, though, an anthropologist can give those people the chance to respond to the anthropologist’s ideas, or to actively help produce those ideas.

The French documentary film Jaguar (1967), by French anthropologist Jean Rouch, is an example of such a dialogue.  It is about African labor migration and features three men who traveled to the coast for work.  Its narration was recorded by the three men while watching a silent, rough cut of the film.  Thus, while Rouch filmed and edited the footage, the film’s subjects gave it its narration.  This gives these labor migrants the chance to comment on their own society and the film itself.  However, although their voiceover is an integral part of the film, Rouch still made the final decisions about the film.  The decision to use such narration, after all, suited his ideas as an anthropologist and filmmaker about “shared anthropology,” or collaboration between anthropologists and their subjects.  In my case, I’m gathering Palestinians’ ideas about U.S. news articles – but in the end, I’ll write up the results of the interviews, and I’ll select the critiques I find most noteworthy.

Bringing U.S. news to Palestinians may not seem like a revolutionary idea in our era of fast, online media. But the world is still not as “flat” as some might presume.  Even though many Palestinians are concerned with representations of them in U.S. media, most do not read U.S. news, partly because of language barriers, and partly because they have their own media to attend to.

The last few years, I have been studying how U.S. journalism and Palestinian politics influence each other.  Generally, U.S. journalists and Palestinians interact at the beginning of writing a news article.  U.S. journalists seek out quotes from officials, activists, parents, farmers.  Then, although these Palestinians’ words are transported all over the world, they tend not to come home to roost.  In gathering Palestinian interpretations of U.S. news – and publishing their interpretations and critiques in the United States – I aim to give Palestinians the chance to reply to what U.S. newspapers say about them.  Is anger the best way to describe how Palestinians felt at Arafat’s funeral? How will Palestinians respond to a lyrical article about kite flying that may not make its politics front and center?  This summer, I’m aiming to find out.

This research was funded by the Tufts University Faculty Research Fund.